Students for an Orwellian Society: "The mission of SOS is to promote the vision of a society based upon the principles of Ingsoc, first articulated by George Orwell in his prophetic novel, '1984'". I hope this is just pretty basic irony. Still scary though. (via Monochrom) ···

Tricks of the Trade. Now as a weblog.···

Netdisaster. You can spill coffee over Wired.com, flood Slashdot.org, and destroy any webpage in pretty neat ways (Flash required). (via The Tao of Mac)···

The 2004 Scene.org Awards. Got aware of these a bit too late, as the winners have been already announced. Still, I downloaded all the nominees, so I can check what is the demoscene up to these days.···

One of the few teachers at college I actually recognize as a real professor keeps saying the key to being a successful artist (and for starters to being recognized as one) is stamina, and to keep sending stuff over to festivals and contests no matter how bad we get rejected, to pay no mind to the inevitable hard heartbreaks. So, there we were at FEST (I won't bother linking), a short film festival nearby in Espinho, to watch our own seven-part Seven Seals of the Apocalypse in a big screen.



So: the image on the left (actress Sofia Pinto in the third chapter I directed) is an actual screen capture from the DVD, image on the right is an unexaggerated simulation of what people watched in the competitive session. Put it this way: the whole movie is dark and somber, pre-apocalyptic noir, but not that dark in which not once you get a look at the people's faces, as if the whole movie had went through murderous gamma settings. Obviously, something went very wrong as the organization dubbed the copy into the projection tapes. Obviously enough, at the end of the session we could hear the typical gross generalization from the jumpy, obviously affiliated with some other film people — "ESAP movies always suck". And let me tell you a not-so-much-of-a-secret: I do reckon The Seven Seals of the Apocalypse sucks. But: you can't be a judge when you just watched only 20% of the movie's luminance information, can you? And you didn't have to be really smart to understand there was something very wrong with the projection, the same way you can tell if a television has poor contrast even if you're watching something for the first time. Anyway, it still hurts. Organizers watched the session and just said nothing, no apologies, no excuses. Because of the festival organization's lack of basic professionalism, our names were dragged in the mud. It's all about keeping the stamina indeed.···

The Lost Format Preservation Society. A catalog of current and obsolete media discs, tapes and drums. Hm, I like the design, but the information is rather thin and out of nothing I can recall a dozen of formats not listed there. Does anyone know an even more detailed catalog? (via GMT+9)···

The Uncyclopedia. As the name suggests, it's like Wikipedia, only packing very, very inaccurate information. And darn funny. Of course, we ought to expect some poor souls to deliver college papers based on such bad information.···

Cat and Girl: "Instead of having 15 minutes of fame, everyone gets to be famous for 1500 people". So funny because it's true.···

Satellite images of The Drought. Scary and impressive, as for years people are expecting the Sahara Desert to cross the Mediterranean into the Iberian Peninsula as a long-delayed iminent earthquake. And the weather is all buggered up. No significant rain here in Porto since October (Porto being a city with rather wet winters), and it's impressive the amount of dust everywhere — and the roadworks nearby where I live make my street look as if blasted by billion-year old Martian dust.···

Rui Carmo's Ten Reason's Why Blogging Doesn't Matter versus Tim Bray's Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good for your Career. And it seems both are right, in a way, as I gather this is just another example of the Great Atlantic Cultural Divide, worsened by the fact Portugal is even more extreme than the rest of Europe in its corporativist culture and disdain for individualism, always mistaken for arrogance and poisoned by envy. So yeah: mention your blog to certain people and you're a nerd. Make too much noise about your opinions (and what is a blog's prime content?) and you can be seen as dangerously smart or dangerously daft, but always dangerous. But mention your blog to some other people, and they might actually like it. So it always boils to judging the people you work with, or hope to work with, or the niche you're in. So. Here's my One Reason Why Blogging Tends to be Absolutely Neutral for a Large Set of Statiscally Analysed People's Careers.···

Konono nº1. Electrified traditional Congolese music, made with makeshift electronic instruments, mixing desks and mikes. I'm definitely curious about it. Resourcefulness is what sets true professionalism and passion apart from mere tool fetish of the "without Apparatus X you're a mere amateur" kind. I truly admire this kind of will. (via O Nulo Dispositivo) ···

So I spent most of last week editing the short Weltschmerz. Now that I'm taking care of colour grading and special effects, there are a few scenes which I already consider final. Part of the Smart Pills project, Weltschmerz is a sci-fi short taking place in a near future in which people enhance their brains with nanotech computers delivered with the simple ingestion of a pill (similar to the concept of 'neural nanonics' in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy). However, many aren't able to deal emotionally with the overflow of information.



So they go to the doctor. In scene 1, Catarina (played by Isa Magalhães), the main character, awaits impatiently at the lobby of the doctor's office. She's despaired and impatient and carries an old suitcase with no particular reason, only that it is a prop (and it's actually mine) that makes an appearence in all Smart Pills shorts. Because it's fun for us directors.



Rita the office attendant (played by my colleague Joana Gaio, who directed a Smart Pills chapter herself), greets Catarina with a "just sit down, wait, and leave me alone" attitude.



Scene 5 is a flashback of creepy and strange stuff that happened during the testing phase of the nanodevices. I chose to shoot it with my crappy tourist-grade handycam (image destroyed further by a dirty black diffusion filter) and — even worse — with my toy Benq photo camera set to 320x240 video mode — of which you are looking at an example. Then I pushed the saturation and added glow and grain, fucking the picture to bits. Which is nice.



In scene 6 Catarina wakes up the following morning and discovers that unconsciously she took the 'sadistic pill', the proposed treatment for people too smart to be able to cope with an evil, evil world.···

Microsoft to include new fonts in the next Windows releases. Which look good, apparently: I can imagine myself using Calibri, Constantia and Corbel a lot more than I do use Arial (yuck) or Times New Roman. But why do all fonts' names start with a 'C'?···

DIY design contest winners. Weblog design*sponge held a competition of do-it-yourself design items, and the results are indeed interesting and inspirational, featuring classics such as the record bowl (I happen to have made a couple of these myself) and innovative items such as a cardboard chair. I expect some of these items to be picked up by the trendy merchants and to be on sale in 'alternative-chic-expensive' shops soon, along with the usual record bowls and ashtrays (yep, at ten euro each — yikes!), A4-sized inkjet prints of cult film posters (which I've seen being sold in cheap glass frames for 25 euros — double yikes!) and women's purses made from recylcled coffee bags.···

Fliker.com (Shockwave required). An image search engine that 'flicks' results as you type.···

Museum of Bad Album Covers. What do we love? That's right, there are never enough examples of bad album art. And the top ten in this one is downright scary.···

Skip blogging was an unintended consequence of my decision to go AWOL at college therefore staying home for a week. I needed some time to mourn and stay away from certain relationships, and most importantly, to focus on work that needed to be done, as lately classes were becoming time-consuming though unproductive spaces, as it seems to be the routine in the weeks before Easter, which took away all motivation. Therefore, I spent a week without setting foot on college, at home, working for college. The wonders of the procrastination-bent portuguese educational tradition. I thought I'd have plenty of time for blogging, but I ended up procrastinating on blogging so I worked on the stuff that hopefully will bring me bread and a career. Proof will follow, after I clean the desktop clutter.···

M-City Constructor (Flash required). Create a city from isometric stencil blocks. Including buildings and giant robots.···

Every Calvin & Hobbes strip ever. It's weird to think it's almost ten years since Bill Watterson abruptly stopped the comic. I'm old, indeed.···

The antidepression device. This is why life is scary these days. It hurts to be in love, insecure about my professional future and having a sick relative at home all at the same time, but the same way I guard myself from drugs (of all kinds — smoking, drinking, shooting, snorting and prescribed pills), I don't believe having a device implanted in my skull giving me electroshocks whenever I start to fall to the dark side is going to help me in any realistic way. And we might as well replace our entire society with androids if we are to be trained pets. Just consider how scary the cabal is: the same way such a device may interfere with depression, it may interfere with dissent. It's Prozac Nation gone permanent, people who ever express dissent put a pacemaker so they stop bothering. Disgusting.···